A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

HEARING THE HEAVENLY SYMPHONY: AN OVERVIEW OF
HILDEGARD’S MUSICAL OEUVRE WITH CASE STUDIES
Tova Leigh-Choate, William T. Flynn, and Margot E. Fassler
This chapter introduces the musical dimensions of Hildegard’s visionary
experiences and the works that emerged from them. Hildegard herself
claimed that music—the heavenly symphonia—was an integral part of
“what she saw and heard.”1 By any standards, medieval or modern, the
anchoress-turned-abbess composed a remarkable body of songs, many of
whose texts are embedded within her visionary treatises and other works,
in addition to their melodic settings in surviving manuscripts. From the
song texts in the fijinal vision of Scivias to the collected works notated
in the Riesenkodex, Hildegard’s songs cannot be separated from her
oeuvre as a whole or from the Benedictine and other ecclesiastical circles
in which she moved.
We begin with two overviews to provide a framework for discussing
Hildegard’s music. The fijirst is a critical overview of scholarship concerning
Hildegard’s collection of liturgical songs, the Symphonia armonie
celestium revelationum, and her music drama Ordo uirtutum, including a
summary of the manuscripts. The second discusses the chronology of the
works themselves and describes their possible layers of development. We
then offfer analytical case studies of what seem to be Hildegard’s earliest
musical compositions: the Scivias songs, represented by the song (Nam)
O vos angeli, and the Ordo.
An Overview of the Scholarly Literature: Editions and Translations
Some of the most influential scholarly works are the several editions of
Hildegard’s chants and her music drama, both for the texts and music they
provide scholars and performers, and for their translations, commentaries,
1 Hildegard consistently described her visions in audio-visual terms, repeatedly using
the construction uidi et audiui, e.g. Letter 1 in Epistolarium, I, pp. 4–5, ll. 38–39: “quia magnos
labores habeo in hac uisione, quatenus dicam quod uidi et audiui,” and the opening of
her fijinal vision in Scivias 3.13, p. 614, l. 27: “Deinde uidi lucidissimum aerem, in quo audiui.”
The authors are grateful to Jane Flynn for her assistance with this chapter.